


Repent Ye Beggars One and All

by Quillori



Category: Primeval
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-24
Updated: 2010-12-24
Packaged: 2018-02-05 11:49:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1817473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quillori/pseuds/Quillori
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Written for <a href="http://desree-rd.livejournal.com">desree_rd</a> for Primeval Denial's 2010 Secret Santa.</p><p>Prompt: Improvising Christmas Eve after a call out</p>
    </blockquote>





	Repent Ye Beggars One and All

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [desree_rd](http://desree-rd.livejournal.com) for Primeval Denial's 2010 Secret Santa.
> 
> Prompt: Improvising Christmas Eve after a call out

"Bloody Christmassy this is."

Stephen looked thoughtfully round the car interior, which, unsurprisingly, lacked any sign of Christmas cheer. He couldn't quite imagine Cutter hanging an ornament from the rear view mirror, or sticking a miniature nativity on the dashboard.

"We don't actually have to sit here. Everyone else has gone home."

Cutter continued to stare out into the darkness without bothering to answer. Didn't want to go home, then, not that the moody bastard was likely to admit it.

He tried again, "There must be a pub somewhere that's still open."

Cutter continued to stare at nothing with an expression of stoic gloominess that always encouraged in Stephen the secret desire to ruffle his hair affectionately, not that he could conceivably have got away with it, not even in the old days. Still, there was something endearing about Cutter's moods, even if the man wouldn't have appreciated hearing it.

"Tell you what, let's just sit here in the dark for a while. I always wanted to spend Christmas Eve parked in an empty field."

That did get a momentary smile, and Cutter's attention. "I'm sorry. Did you have plans?" The smile had dropped away again and he looked far too serious and unhappy for just another inconveniently timed call-out.

"Not this year. Wouldn't be your fault anyway - if you'd figured out how to call anomalies into existence, I don't think you'd have put it to use buggering up everyone's Christmas plans."

Cutter shook his head and kept right on looking miserable. "You wouldn't be part of this at all of it weren't for me. Well, me and Helen, but mostly me. It's my fault."

"Your fault? I've seen real, live dinosaurs. I've visited past. Cutter, I've _visited the past_. Would you want all this to be happening and know nothing about it, if you were me? And I have a job here, one I'm good at. I'm quite sure I'm where I'm meant to be."

"You followed me into this, you keep on following me and I almost get you killed."

"Don't be daft; of course I'm not going to let you wander off alone. God knows what you'd do without me."

"Something heroic and stupid, probably," Cutter said ruefully. "But that's the thing: I don't want you doing it for me."

Trust Cutter to think the middle of a muddy field on Christmas Eve was the perfect time for a heart to heart - of course he wouldn't talk when Stephen tried repeatedly to patch things up, and then decide without warning to start blaming himself for everything when there was no one around he still trusted to talk him out of it. Still, since there was no one else to hand, Stephen would have to do.

"Don't get carried away there: I'm always going to look out for you, but I do things for my sake too, because they're the right thing to do. I'm not supposed to be your responsibility." Stephen faltered for a moment - saying he was supposed to be Cutter's friend was maybe not the best plan right now - and settled on "We're supposed to be able to rely on each other. It goes both ways."

Cutter went back to staring out the window, hopefully thinking about it. It had started to spit with rain again, drops splattering on the windscreen in little silvery bursts.

"It's just, I wanted to say..." Cutter trailed off, having apparently reached the limit of his ability to talk about it while sober, which was, all things considered, a relief. Perhaps it was lucky they weren't doing this in a pub. Stephen gave it a minute, then tactfully changed the subject.

"You know what? If we had some tinsel, we could wind it round the sun visors."

"What the? Stephen, what the hell are you talking about?"

"You wanted Christmassy. How much more Christmassy can you get than tinsel?"

"You seriously think I'm going to fill my car with tinsel?"

Stephen grinned at him. "Maybe a little string of lights, too? And a plastic snowman. You could get a couple of sheets of snowflake stickers - big, glittery ones."

"That's, God that's terrible." Cutter grinned back at him, successfully distracted from brooding. "We spend five hours chasing a herd of Hypsilophodon in the rain – and never have I had such sympathy with sheepdogs – and you manage to come up with something worse."

The car was a little haven of warmth and light in the cold, sodden field, and just for a moment there was an echo of how it used to be, when even when they disagreed, they'd still always been in step. But not much point thinking of that now.

Cutter, though, was clearly in a mood for reminiscence. "Remember last year? If we'd known about anomalies then, I'd have said those were really some future creature that just looked like Christmas tree lights - nothing inanimate could be that malevolent." It was a poor joke, but they'd been teasing each other about their respective abilities to master a string of particularly bloody minded lights for years.

After Helen had vanished, Stephen had hovered around Cutter incessantly, genuinely worried about him but also grateful for the company of someone else who truly missed her. He'd told himself that with her gone it needn't matter why he missed her, it was just something he had in common with Cutter. It had worked, too: Cutter had accepted that Stephen understood how he felt and been grateful for it, ascribing it to empathy and nothing more. The first Christmas, Stephen had made a particular point of spending as much time with Cutter as possible, and found it unexpectedly satisfying: however much he'd loved Helen, he'd only had bits and pieces of her attention, scraps of praise when he did what she wanted, certainly nothing domestic. Helping Cutter put up a few decorations, sharing a takeaway, just sitting quietly in the same room, each doing their own work, had been oddly satisfying; he'd found he liked having somewhere he could feel he belonged, where he could always rely on being welcome. Cutter had valued him in a way he'd always wanted and never quite believed he'd get from Helen.

It had become a yearly habit to spend much of the run up to Christmas with Cutter, and they'd gradually developed their own traditions, until it had been inconceivable to think of Christmas any other way. This year he hadn't liked to turn up uninvited, and Cutter had said nothing about it. He had no idea, really, where he stood: almost dying in Cutter's place had only ensured Cutter felt guilty as well as betrayed, and he had no idea how to go about fixing things, or even if he deserved for them to be fixed. Still, he was determined to keep trying.

"Tell you what, let's go back to your place - I can get a taxi home from there, no need to put you to any trouble." Stephen paused - he couldn't quite bring himself to look at Cutter but he could see his expression reflected in the windscreen. Could see it, but not read it; but he'd never backed down from anything he'd set himself to do, and look how he'd for paid for the one time he'd let cowardice tempt him to avoid facing the truth. He took a deep breath. "We could maybe have a night-cap. You can show me how well you managed this year without my help."

All right, that expression he could read - it was as near to sheepish as Cutter got. "You haven't done anything at all, have you?"

"I have a tree."

"You mean that two foot high plastic one you won in a Christmas raffle? Digging that out of the back of a cupboard doesn't count." Stephen could vividly remember that first year, pushing Cutter to do something to celebrate rather than sit aimlessly staring into space, wondering futilely if he were at fault, if there were something more he could or should have done; Stephen had never cared much for Christmas himself, but insisting Cutter go to the bother of decorating gave him an excuse to turn up whenever he liked, helping out and checking on his progress.

"You just want me to admit I can't manage so much as a string of lights without you."

"You can't." Which had been a perennial joke between them in better days. Perhaps it still was? Certainly Cutter was looking happier - less as though he were sinking in the slough of despond, and also not as though he were planning to hit Stephen again or start back on the subject of betrayal.

"So you come back to mine, have a drink, and gloat about how little I've done without you. There may not be any Christmas decorations, but I've a couple of bottles of Scotch I can practically hear calling our names"

"No, wait up." Stephen opened the door and sprinted for the trees at the edge of the field, the ground squelching beneath his feet; luckily the rain was easing off again, although not so much he wasn't going to get wet. Selecting the biggest branch he thought he could break off and would fit in the car, he indulged in a quick spot of property damage - it hardly mattered, really, since the Hypsilophodons had done far more damage than the odd branch. Looking around, he saw he was in luck - there was sea buckthorn still with berries, so he broke off some of that too, cursing as the thorns scratched his hands; had he known the evening would feature impromptu foraging for decorations, he would have brought gloves.

Back at the car, he dumped the branches on the back seat. "Item: one very modern and stylised Christmas tree, which to those not in the know looks rather like a bare branch. Item: a fine selection of colourful holly."

"Holly is not orange."

"If you leave decorating until Christmas Eve you have to use your imagination. Item: a fine selection of extremely rare orange holly. And now let's go: I'm cold and wet and I could use that drink."

Cutter was definitely smiling now, eyes crinkling with something approaching laughter, which was exactly the plan and well worth fooling about in the rain for. But there was still a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach that this couldn't last: any minute now Cutter would object that he had no right to be making plans, no right to casually invite himself back into Cutter's life or behave as though they were still friends. Stephen wanted so much to have his life back on solid ground, to get up in the morning confident he was going to be useful: a valued teammate and a dependable friend. He and Cutter had counted on each other for so long, and he'd got so used to the weight of Cutter's reliance on him, he felt off-balance and isolated without it. It was such a fucking relief for Cutter to fall back into the easy camaraderie they'd once shared; he couldn't help remembering, though, that he'd thought before that maybe things were going to be all right, only to find himself still rejected.

"Look, what I'm trying to say is," Cutter paused for a moment, but it was all right – he was still smiling, so surely he wasn't about to rescind his invitation. "I'm trying to say, I'm sorry."

There was a somewhat longer pause.

"You don't have to look so shocked. I do admit I'm wrong sometimes."

Stephen shook his head. "But you weren't wrong about anything, I was. You were right about the anomalies being able to change things, and I was wrong about Helen, and Lester, and to be angry with you when it was my fault for not being honest with you in the first place."

"Stephen, in case you hadn't noticed, we're sitting in the middle of nowhere, stone cold sober: there's no way in Hell I'm going to tell you you're the best friend a man could have. Maybe later, after we've done justice to the Scotch. And knock off the apologizing; it's embarrassing you're so much better at it than I am."

"It's all right, I know you don't have much practice."

"Exactly. I'm almost always right." Cutter coughed. "It's just, when I'm not… Anyway, enough of that. The Hypsilophodons are all back in the past where they belong, and here and now we have an old branch, I mean a Christmas tree, to put up, and I know how much you look forward to your yearly opportunity to mock me, so we can dig out those lights and put them on the branch. I'm sure it will only take me an hour or so to untangle them and replace all the bust bulbs. You're not in any hurry to get home, are you?"

"And leave you to electrocute yourself? No. Besides, that Scotch won't drink itself. How could I abandon you in your hour of need?"

Cutter looked over at him as he started the car, and it was definitely the old Cutter, the one whose moods he could predict and who reliably trusted him and wanted him around, the one he'd feared was now irrevocably lost to the past. "I know you won't, Stephen." His voice was warm with obvious affection, although the moment would probably have been improved had the car not turned out to be stuck in the mud; digging it out together in the cold and increasingly heavy rain might be a team effort, but it was not going to top Stephen's list of potential future traditions.


End file.
